Recipe 6.6. Searching and Replacing in JOE
6.6.1 Problem
You're editing some
document and finding a particularly annoying misspelling all over the
place. What tools does JOE offer for finding and replacing words,
text strings, and punctuation in a document?
6.6.2 Solution
Use the ^K F command for all of your
find-and-replace needs. Use special search sequences, which are
JOE's regular expressions, for fine-grained, precise
searches.
Begin a search with ^K F. Use the up and down
arrows to scroll through your previous search and replace terms.
^L continues a search without the replace
function.
For example, say you find yourself typing
"nucular," even though you know
better, because you hear it all day from your annoying coworker. You
need to go back through your work and change it to
"nuclear." Here's
how:
^K F
Find (^C to abort): \<nucular\>
(I)gnore (R)eplace (B)ackwards Bloc(K) NNN (^C to abort): r
Replace with (^C to abort): nuclear
Replace (Y)es (N)o (R)est (B)ackup (^C to abort)? r
Note the use of \<\>. This tells JOE to
perform a whole-word search. Otherwise, JOE will conduct a literal
search for your search string, even if it's inside
another word.
Rather than correcting the spelling, you may wish to draw attention
to this annoying habit of your coworker by putting quotation marks
around the word:
Replace with (^C to abort): "\&"
The result is:
"nucular"
Or you can really go nuts, using:
Replace with (^C to abort): "It's nuclear, not "\&" dammit!!"
which creates:
"It's nuclear, not "nucular" dammit!!"
To find a match only at the beginning of a line, use:
\^nucular
To find a match only at the end of a line, use:
nucular\$
To find empty lines, use:
\^\$
To find whitespace, press the spacebar and tab key inside the square
brackets:
\[ ]
To match any character in the square brackets (for doing a
case-insensitive search), use:
\[Nn]ucular
To match any number of characters, use:
nu\*r
To match exactly one character, use:
nuc\?l
6.6.3 See Also
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